The TVAD Research Group, based in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, researches relationships between text, narrative and image. We publish books, journal articles, host a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, Writing Visual Culture (previously Working Papers on Design) and host events including international conferences.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

The last in our series of reflections on the research seminars presented as part of the TVAD Talks series in the autumn term of 2014 is Dr Barbara Brownie's ‘Shoes
Without Feet: The presence of absence in empty-shoe memorials’, presented on Wednesday December 10th 2014. Here is the abstract for the talk, and a film of Barbara's presentation is below, with some images discussed in the presentation.

Personal artefacts left behind by the victims of conflict and tragedy
become part of the material culture of war. The piles of clothes and shoes
that were left behind at Auschwitz and Dachau, give us a sense of the thousands
of victims who once owned them. Holocaust museums in particular display
shoes among other primary artefacts as “tangible proof in the face of debate
about, and even denial of, what transpired [during the holocaust]” (Williams,
2007, p. 25). Shoe memorials exhibit what philosopher Patrick Fuery (cited
in Bille et al. 2010, p. 5) describes as “secondary absence”, that is, not
absence itself, but absence that is “defined by its connection to presence”.
Memorialists are directly concerned with expressing absence through presence.
Shoes are presented as witnesses to past events, and are sometimes the only
surviving evidence of the existence of the people who once wore them.

Though they are designed with the intention of
referencing the past, shoe memorials often say more about the contemporary
communities that construct them than they say about the memorialised victims.
Particularly in recent temporary shoe memorials, for which shoes are repurposed
(often donated by members of the bereaved community), victims are remembered as
through the eyes of the living. There is an artificiality to these memorials
that reflects a desire for familiarity rather than authenticity. Repurposed for
use in a memorial, shoes are transformed into sacred objects. Once archived,
the memorial artefacts are more effective as a record of public grief than of
the tragedy itself.

This TVAD discussion will present examples of
holocaust shoe memorials at Auschwitz and on the river Danube in Budapest, in
which shoes are presented to document the suffering of victims, in contrast to
vernacular and temporary memorials of the past two decades, for which shoes are
selected to represent the grief of those left behind. I will address how shoes
transform parks and streets into "traumascapes" or, in some cases,
into data visualisations which precisely quantify loss.